245 Pacifica 4 (1991)

Hellenism and the Abandonment of Particularism in Jesus and Paul

William Loader

Abstract: Recent research has been reminding us of the extent of the Hellenisation of Galilee. This calls for a reassessment of the possible impact upon Jesus of life in a crosscultural context. The traditions about his sitting lightly towards certain aspects of the Torah should be seen against this background. We should also consider the possible influence of popular critiques of religion. The latter may well have had an impact on Paul's thought as he grappled with the role of Torah. The origins of Christianity need to be seen in the context of such major cultural shifts and discussions of the particular and the universal in religion.

STUDIES OF GALILEE over recent decadesi indicate that we must abandon the view that Jesus came from a rural backwater of Aramaic speaking peasantry. Geography alone should have alerted us to the falsity of this understanding. Galilee belongs, along with the valley of Jezreel and Megiddo, to the most accessible parts of southern Palestine. There the coastal range, which keeps at bay the plains, is broken north of Mount Carmel and opens the door to the Mediterranean world in the west and to the major transjordan trade route and the Dekapolis of Hellenistic cities in the east. From the Sea of Galilee to the coast is
1 See especially S. Freyne, Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988); also D. R. Edwards, "Who Were the First Urban Christians? Urbanization in Galilee in the First Century", a paper read at the Society for Biblical Literature International Conference, Sheffield, July 1988. Note also M. Hengel's new book on Judea in the first century, The "Hellenization" of Judea in the First Century after Christ (London: SCM, 1989) and generally, J. H. Charlesworth, Jesus within Judaism (New York: Doubleday, 1988).

246 Pacifica 4 (October 1991) scarcely 40 km as the crow flies. It is on the plains of Megiddo, Armageddon, that many battles have been fought, and it is not by chance that visionaries foresaw this as the place of the final showdown of the nations. Lower Galilee in the time of Jesus has been estimated to be among the most populated areas of the Roman empire, 2 with a number of large cities like Sepphoris and Tiberias, and smaller ones like Capernaum, forming a network which linked the major trading world with smaller towns and village life in the Galilean hinterland. In the larger cities Hellenistic influence in town planning, architecture, cult and lifestyle, would have been strong and we may assume with confidence that even those who, like Jesus, mostly frequented the smaller towns like Capernaum, would have had regular encounters with the wider cosmopolitan world of Hellenism. Capernaum, where Jesus appears to have lived, was also a significant border post to the Dekapolis. The pattern of a Jesus coming from the pristine rural backwater of pious Galilean Judaism to be crucified in the big city and, with Easter, to begin a movement that emerged from a sheltered Judaism into the Hellenistic world of diaspora Judaism and its cosmopolitan pagan environment, must be redrawn. Jesus may even have taught in Greek another good reason for students to learn Greek! - or at least lived in an environment already strongly influenced by Hellenism. A strong case can be made beyond this that not only his world, but also his thinking, bear marks of attitudes to life and religion as much characteristic of Hellenism as of Judaism and that his origins in the cross-cultural Galilean environment had an important bearing on his ministry and message. 3 In this article I want to explore the issues in overview, by considering Jesus and Paul in turn.

I. JESUS

1 want to begin in the briefest way by outlining central aspects of Jesus' teaching and the way they relate to Judaism. Jesus announced So D. R. Edwards, 1988 International Society for Biblical Literature meeting: Capernaum estimated 10-15,000; Magdala, 10km away, 40,000 (Josephus); Tiberias 30-40,000 and Sepphoris 30-40,000 (some debate about extent of Hellenistic development in it early in the first century - at least by late in the century it had a theatre holding 3-4,000). There were therefore a significant number of cities and villages in a 20-35km stretch. 3 Jerusalem was also strongly influenced by Hellenism but, it may be argued, was less cross-cultural (in the sense of having a significant Gentile population) than Galilee of the Gentiles.
2

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God's new initiative in history: God's impending reign, the kingdom of God. It was good news, promising salvation, often portrayed as a great fellowship feast after prophetic models. The promise also set the agenda for life now, since it called for acceptance of the promise, joining the community of promise and living in accordance with its hope.4 This programme was not a departure from Jewish hope but an expression of it. Jesus proclaimed the impending reign of the God of Israel. It is therefore important to note central elements of Israel's faith. These include, in particular: Torah/scripture, cult, land, and election as God's people. These are aspects of a whole. An attack on any one of these would be seen as an attack on Torah itself, and Torah is the underlying authority for all. Jesus' ministry of good news had direct bearing on each of these central elements of Israel's faith. It appears that Jesus understood himself as upholding the T o r a h / scripture. If anything, many of his teachings take scriptural laws and make them stricter: for example, on murder, adultery, divorce, oaths, retaliation, and loving one's neighbour, to cite only those of the Matthean antitheses (Matt 5:21-48). The reign of God called for a total obedience and this radicalised the Law's demands, sometimes even to a point where the new demand stood in direct conflict with the old formulation (for instance, on oaths) and sometimes where it called for abandonment of the old (for instance, on divorce). But Jesus faced conflict with Jewish authorities also about cultic aspects of Torah provision, both in relation to food and purity laws and in relation to the temple cult that governed the system in accordance with the place given the cultus in holy scripture. Even if the radical Jesus of Mark 7, who abandons scriptural law on clean and unclean food, is probably a projection back of the conclusions of later Christian generations (see Peter's vision in Acts 10), a strong case can be made that the beginnings of such a stance lie with Jesus himself. In early Christianity they are related to issues of eating with Gentiles and eating food offered to idols: in Jesus they are related to his readiness to go beyond the norm. He did so by associating and eating with the ritually unclean and by offering to both the ritually and morally 4 I am not persuaded by those who deny to the historical Jesus such an eschatological orientation: see for example M. Borg, Jesus: A New Vision (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987); B. L. Mack, A Myth of Innocence (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988). This is more than a plea for some authentic Jesustradition behind future "kingdom of God" sayings; it is also based on an understanding of a range of other material, including parables, reversal sayings, and so on. In this I agree with Charlesworth, Jesus within Judaism, and E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (London: SCM, 1985), for instance.

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unclean belonging and acceptance among God's people without, in most cases, following the biblical provisions for re-entry, which entailed rituals of purification governed by the temple cultus.5 This departure was somewhat exacerbated by Jesus' healing ministry, which both illustrated an implicit claim to divine power and made people's re-entry into the community possible, again without, for the most part, following the scriptural provisions for such re-entry. What becomes of Torah, scripture, temple, God's gifts, when they are disregarded in this way? Land was also central to Israelite faith. Possession was land to a large degree, at least in the sense that this, too, was commonly understood (and still is) as God's covenant gift to Israel. Jesus called people to give up possessions and follow him. Election as God's people was also central. Jesus had been associated with John who defied a dependence on sonship of Abraham. Jesus travelled to Gentile territory and had encounters with Gentiles. Here, however, we should observe that generally he is more to be noted for preserving a strong Israel identity. Of Jesus' act of compassion towards Zacchaeus, Luke has Jesus explain: "For he, too, is a son of Abraham." Jesus probably chose twelve disciples and he understood that both his ministry and that of his disciples was to be only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matt 10:5f, 23; 15:24). The differences between Jesus and contemporary Judaism should not be exaggerated. At one level, the radicalisation of the demands of Torah flow from the eschatological vision and have their parallel in other groups of the time (for example, the Essenes). The Pharisees were already reflecting a form of egalitarianism, at least in relationship to cultic holiness. When Jesus uses creation and everyday life
5 Sanders, in Jesus and Judaism, argues that the significance of Jesus was not breach of purity laws. Mixing with Gentiles was almost as inevitable as menstruation and childbirth for women - these are not sins, but events requiring subsequent purification rites. Nor, he argues, should we see Jesus' appeal to sinners as distinctive; other Jews, too, appealed for sinners to return. Jesus did not call people to repent. Rather, Jesus offered sinners a place without requiring of them the usual rites of re-entry through the temple. I think Sanders is right in this last point, but not in his attempt to rule out any calls to repentance by Jesus as inauthentic, nor in his relegation of the purity issue. I think it likely that Jesus caused offence by deliberately going beyond the norms of inevitable cultic pollution in his mixing with outcasts and the impure, especially at meals. He did not seek to avoid such pollution when it was avoidable; this also seems to be the point in Peter's contact with the centurion in Acts and in the presence of Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians in a common meal at Antioch as reported in Galatians 2.

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examples in his teaching, these may be reminiscent of the wisdom traditions of the Old Testament and Judaism. Similarly, Jesus appears not only to pronounce judgement on the temple, but also to share with many contemporaries the hope for a restored temple in a short time. As Freyne points out, 6 we have no evidence of Jesus ever refusing the temple dues. His vision of the kingdom seems also to have espoused the prophetic hope that the Gentiles would join God's people in the eschaton. His appeal to divine compassion is solidly rooted in Old Testament expressions of God's initiative for his broken and erring people, especially as expressed in second Isaiah. I do not believe, therefore, that Jesus saw himself as abandoning Torah, temple, land or people. The issues seem to have been to a large degree how these were interpreted. And this was crucial. The fact that early Christianity faced a range of issues with no initial answers suggests that Jesus had not instructed his disciples in a way which clarified precisely the role of Torah, temple, land and chosen people and had certainly not left the impression that these were in any sense to be abandoned. The disciples still had to grapple with the legitimacy of the Gentile mission, the possibility of waiving circumcision and food laws, the place of temple and Jerusalem, and the continuing status of Israel as a chosen people. They were far from unanimous in their conclusions.7 So far I have deliberately discussed the issues surrounding Jesus without referring to the Galilean context. I now want to ask to what degree consideration of the Galilean context might supplement the above picture of Jesus and Judaism. Two aspects need to be distinguished here: one relates to the impact of living so close to a Gentile environment, the phenomenon of being exposed to diversity of culture; the other relates to specific influences from within Hellenism. People are often profoundly affected by being exposed to cultures other than their own, frequently much more than they realise. The story of such encounters and the responses to them is at the heart of much that went on in Judaism in the Hellenistic period - and this is so of most other peoples of the period, not least in Greece itself, and, above all, initially in Athens. The range of shocking experiences includes realisation that there are other gods, other value systems, other political systems. Such plurality may evoke a fortress mentality where the "other" is
6 Freyne, Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels, 239 f. 7 I have discussed this in more detail in my article, "Jesus Left Loose Ends", Pacifica 2(1989)212-28.

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seen as a threat. The drive towards synthesis may lead to an inclusive syncretism, or the attempt to come to terms with the diversity may create a new basis of unity. This often entails a relativising reappropriation of one's own traditions. The plurality calls into question the particularities of the kind exemplified in Judaism's attitude towards its Torah, cult, land and election. The initial wave of Hellenism which swept through Palestine was stemmed for a short time through the Maccabean revolt in the second century BCE. Its influence continued, however, both in Palestine itself and in the diaspora. With few exceptions, the dominant pattern was not assimilation to Hellenism or syncretism but adaptation while holding fast to the particularity of Torah, temple, land and election. Even Philo of Alexandria, who appropriates the most devastating critiques of cult religion Hellenism could offer, and who develops a plethora of allegorical symbolic elucidations of scripture, draws the line quite clearly: it is unacceptable to abandon obedience to the provisions of the cult set down in scripture. He roundly dissociates himself from some who have crossed this line.8 Philo belongs more broadly within a stream of thought which sought to incorporate the philosophical world of Hellenism by seeing it as derivative from Moses, a pattern adopted in a similar way in the second century CE by the Christian apologists. Of course there were others who shut up shop and maintained a fortress mentality in response to the new influences. Some of them, like the Essenes of Qumran and the Pharisees, at least judging by their rabbinic successors, were much more compromised from their intended position than they would have recognised. What about Jesus? As we have seen, Jesus shows no signs of abandoning the pillars of Israel's faith: Torah, temple, land, election. Yet might his particular understanding of these have been enriched also by the world of humanity which formed his earthly context? He understood his mission as directed towards Israel, but he would come into contact regularly with Gentiles in his environment. Did Sepphoris, 4 km from his childhood town of Nazareth, already have its amphitheatre and pagan temples? Had he observed popular wandering preachers of the Cynic mould passing through Capernaum on their way to or from the Dekapolis cities? What conversations would he have had with people of his community with a smattering of Hellenistic education, a little learning of Hellenistic virtues of love and tolerance? How easily could he maintain the particularity of
8

See Philo, The Migration of Abraham, 89-93.

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Israel's claim for its temple, its particular dietary and purity laws, its sacred land claims? Was his return to a creation-theology, and to finding God in the day-to-day events depicted in his parables, an option to think in universal modes consistent with his setting? None of Jesus' teaching shows, to my mind, the impact of popular Platonism - not in the way we find illustrated in the letter to the Hebrews. A heavenly dimension was present in the apocalyptic thought with which Jesus was at home and it is always possible that notions of incorruptible heavenly riches are a faint echo of such influence within that system. But the possibility that his lax attitude towards purity laws derives from the relativising and universalising impact of his social environment ought to be considered. The same might be said of his loosening of the bond with the land. This loosening belongs also to his loosening of the bond with family (quite radically so) and with priestly authority. Some of the closest parallels to such radicalism are found in the Hellenistic world among the Stoics and Cynics and they were quite possibly present on the streets of lower Galilee.9 On the other hand, however, we do not find in extant Jesus-tradition any indications of an attempt to forge a philosophical synthesis such as we find in Philo and his forbears. The centre of Jesus' message is not a system of thought but an eschatological hope. Certainly, Jesus does not show the characteristics of the fortress response to diversity in religion and culture. If anything, he displays a very liberal interpretation of his own religious tradition, which infuriated the fundamentalists and traditionalists anxious to retain their own structures and influence. It is possible that this liberal attitude to particular aspects of Torah may be the fruit of his living in the culturally open Galilean environment and perhaps even, indirectly, the fruit of value systems propounded in that setting. I think it very likely. On the other hand, and for the main part, Jesus must be seen as firmly rooted in the biblical tradition, not in a legalist fashion, but in a creative way which identified and expanded central biblical hopes and did so in a manner which still upheld in some form the particularity of Israel's faith. The disciples were not left with the impression that either Torah, temple, land, or election were to be abandoned as such. On the whole, Jesus was much closer to the Judaism of Qumran and the Pharisees than he was to the strongly Hellenistic
9 Notably Gerd Theissen, Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), has argued for the influence of the Cynicradical-itinerant-preacher-model on Jesus' own ministry and those of his group.

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streams we detect in such as Philo. Yet it would be equally fair to say that it is precisely at the point where Jesus most differs from them that his attitude has most in common with the popular reasonableness and humanness characteristic of a response to cultural diversity such as he faced in Galilee and as is illustrated by popular religio-philosophical movements in the Hellenistic world. 2. PAUL When we consider Paul, we find one who operates generally within the same apocalyptic eschatological framework of thought as Jesus.10 In different terms he, too, looks towards God's promised eschatological initiative. 11 Further, he identifies Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ sent to Israel, whose death and resurrection inaugurated a new beginning, already in the present, through the gift of the Spirit. A right relationship with God is now offered to all peoples, Gentiles included, and this is to be entered and maintained by the commitment of faith and obedience. The new promise is universal and puts all on an equal footing. Paul has arrived at this understanding after a rugged journey. The first obstacle which he and others faced was the question of what to do with Gentiles who responded to the good news. Should they wait to be brought in at the eschaton on God's terms? 12 Should they enter by becoming Jews and, as Jews, then join on equal terms with fellow Jews? Should they be received into the community of promise directly without the intermediate step of Judaism? Paul opted for the last of these alternatives, but he faced a barrage of criticism from Christian Jews committed to the other positions. This was an issue, to a large degree, of how scripture should be understood and obeyed. Was Paul rightly handling the word of God by using the biblical message of divine compassion to overrule biblical commandments about such matters as circumcision in the light of a new 10 In this overall estimate of Paul's apocalypticism I agree with, for example, E. Ksemann, Commentary on Romans (London: SCM, 1980) and J. C. Beker, Paul the Apostle (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980). 11 Sanders, in Jesus and Judaism, argues that where Paul talks about the kingdom of God he does so with a similar eschatological meaning to that given the words by Jesus. 12 Note Ksemann's case that this was the kind of early response that has left its trace in Matt 10:5f, 23. See "The Beginnings of Christian Theology" in his New Testament Questions of Today (London: SCM, 1967).

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situation, or was he, as the fundamentalists of his day argued, thereby abandoning the fundamentals of Israel's faith? The issue was fiercely fought. But the path was just as treacherous when it came to deciding what such non-Jewish believers should do once they were members of the community of promise. Again the outcome hung on how scripture should be understood. One might argue that a new sacrifice had replaced old sacrifices: but how could one argue that food, in itself unclean, was now to be declared clean? And what about purity laws, which are rooted in assumptions about the holy and unholy of fundamental significance for large parts of the scriptural laws? The Acts of the Apostles mentions admission of Gentile Christians with the proviso of commitment to a Noachic torso of biblical cult law set out in the Apostolic Decree of Acts 15:29, but Paul did not even insist on that. The occasional tactical compliance, for which he argued on grounds of compassion (as in 1 Cor 8 and 10 and in Romans 14), was hardly likely to convince those for whom tinkering with God's word at any point was tantamount to apostasy. But, courageously, Paul held his line. He reached the point of abandoning cult law and virtually declaring it only a tactical option in the context of "weaker" Jewish brothers and sisters. In doing so he modified Torah in a major way. When it comes to the notion of election, we find Paul grappling with the underlying issues in a slightly less conflictory mode. The gospel was first to the Jews, then the Gentiles (Romans 1:16-17). But he still does not surrender the particularity of Israel. In Romans 9-11 one cannot tell who will win until the dying stages of the final quarter. By a mystery of God all Israel will be saved, and I believe he means by that a salvation which will entail acceptance of Israel's Christ. On the issue of land it is difficult to make a judgement. I think it very likely that the prophetic image of the Gentiles being brought to Zion informs Paul's own self-understanding as the messenger to the Gentiles and the one who gathers a collection and brings it as a symbol of the harvest of the Gentiles to Jerusalem (see Romans 15:31). The most severe problem is, notably, Paul's handling of the Law as a whole. Paul argues that his gospel fulfils what the scripture promised and, while his arguments vary in cogency and consistency, I believe he makes his case that the gospel is properly biblical.13 This issue of continuity is of fundamental importance. But, if the positive side is
13 See the excellent treatment by E. Ksemann, J. C. Beker, J. A. Fitzmyer in: J. Reumann (ed.), Righteousness in the New Testament (Philadelphia/New York: Fortress/Paulist, 1982).

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clear, the negative is not. Why not keep all of God's word? If some is to be abandoned, why was it given in the first place? Paul tries a range of explanations, and scholarship is at the moment grappling afresh with the question whether or not these explanations can be shown to have any degree of coherence. 14 At one level they cohere in the conviction that, because Christ is the answer, anything inconsistent with Christ is not. 15 That answer on its own, however, does not deal with the continuity-discontinuity issue and smacks of dogmatic myopia. But this is not the place to explore the range of arguments Paul uses. As indicated above, I find Paul most convincing when he argues that scripture intends to proclaim God's compassion for all. I find the arguments least convincing when Paul appears to suggest that God gave the Law primarily to drive people into a hopeless state of bondage so that they would be ready for Christ the redeemer. It seems to me that much of the way Paul handles the issue of the Law is to be understood in the context of a major shift in understanding religion which had been taking place through the influence of Hellenism, such as we begin to find already in Jesus and which indirectly contributes to a continuity between the two. For, when we look at some of Paul's arguments, we see him adopting the kind of critique of religion which Philo applied to other religions, only now Paul goes on to apply it to Judaism itself, a step Philo would never have dared to have taken. Paul plays off circumcision of the heart against circumcision of the flesh (Romans 2). This is already an Old Testament image. But there, as in Old Testament statements about spiritual sacrifices, abandoning the literal meaning was never intended. Paul does intend such an abandonment, and that is the difference. He argues the uselessness of the outer, the external. He argues the irrelevance of sacral categorisation of food. This is also consistent with Paul's argument that, before God, a negative sacral categorisation of people is irrelevant. It also explains why he can so easily appropriate traditions which speak
14 Sanders, in particular, has raised the issue afresh. See. E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (London: SCM, 1977), Paul, the Law and the Jewish People (London: SCM, 1983). See also the provocative analysis of H. Risnen, Paul and the Law (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986). There has been important discussion of these positions in J. D. G. Dunn, Jesus, Paul and the Law (London: SPCK, 1990), S. Westerholm, Israel's Law and the Church's Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988) and earlier in the Barrett Festschrift, M. D. Hooker and S. G. Wilson (eds.), Paul and Paulinism (London: mSPCK, 1982). 15 Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, argues that this is the real basis of Paul's logic and that all else smacks of rationalisation, evident also in its inconsistency.

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of community as temple, as did the Qumran community, but unlike them, also abandon the cultic particularity of the temple. Paul has thus abandoned the cultic Law and retained the notion of election in a modified form. His attitude to Jerusalem and the land may now be little more than eschatological symbolism on the one hand and pragmatics on the other - Jerusalem is the location of the mother church. This range of attitudes determines in turn his approach to the Torah and scripture generally. Unquestionably the reason for the change in attitude is Paul's belief in Jesus as Israel's Messiah and his understanding that the response to this eschatological good news supersedes all previous categories of acceptance or non-acceptance before God. Alongside this must also go some awareness that Jesus himself affirmed a belonging, for those who did not belong by Law, simply by making a proclamation - without cultic or temple rite. Beside this major christological affirmation, which led to Paul's reassessment of his heritage, there is also another influence which enabled Paul to come to such radical conclusions about the Law, especially its particular cultic and purity provisions. It is his involvement in a major paradigm shift in religious and cultural understanding, from one which retained particularity in the form of localisation of the sacred in book, building, land and people, to one which reassessed these elements from a universalising perspective. This universalising perspective was a major contribution to the influence of the pervading Hellenist culture of the time and its influence can probably already be seen in the stance of Jesus himself. We cannot here explore the detail of specific influence of Hellenistic writers on Paul. What I have wanted to show is that there is an important factor which consistently accompanies Paul's most radical decisions about Christ and the Law beside his faith in Jesus as the Christ. It is his taking over of a popular rationalistic attitude toward particularism in religion, especially the cultic, which is evident in Stoicism, and which enables him to make such statements as: nothing is clean or unclean of itself; outward forms like circumcision do not matter; the spirit matters, not the flesh or the letter. These probably derive, for him, not only from the sheer experience of plurality, but also from specific philosophical and religious responses to plurality which sought a basis for universalism and which relativised the particular. This is not to argue that Jesus or Paul derived their messages primarily from Hellenistic culture or Hellenistic culture aside from its Jewish component. I see both firmly rooted in Judaism and its traditions. But I would argue that, to a greater degree than is usually

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recognised, both also have been influenced by the Hellenistic context in which they lived: Paul, very significantly; Jesus, less so. This Hellenistic influence enables us to recognise a significant continuity between Jesus and Paul in their tendency toward significant abandonment of sacral particularity. It is important to maintain the balance between particularity and universality if we are not to surrender to a ghetto-mentality on the one hand or syncretism on the other. Particularism panders to our desire to possess the divine: in a book, in a sacrament, in an order, in a community. On the other hand, because every site is sacred we can respect the integrity of our different claims without feeling threatened. Without that attitude our universalism is assimilationist - and at worst imperialist and oppressive. Sadly, our Australian history teaches us these truths. In a world in which such issues do not go away, both in the church and in religion and society generally, I am thankful that the worlds of Jesus and Paul, including their mix of Hellenism and Judaism, have been a context for such enormous religious creativity. Such revelation has in part made it possible for us at the ends of the earth to hear the word of God.